語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

The complete title of this book runs ‘Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R’ and as such it very well reflects the purpose and spirit of the book. The author guides the reader in about 350 pages from descriptive and basic statistical methods over classification and clustering to (generalised) linear and mixed models. Each of the methods is introduced in the context of concrete linguistic problems and demonstrated on exciting datasets from current research in the language sciences. In line with its practical orientation, the book focuses primarily on using the methods and interpreting the results. This implies that the mathematical treatment of the techniques is held at a minimum if not absent from the book. In return, the reader is provided with very detailed explanations on how to conduct the analyses using R [1]. The first chapter sets the tone being a 20-page introduction to R. For this and all subsequent chapters, the R code is intertwined with the chapter text and the datasets and functions used are conveniently packaged in the languageR package that is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). With this approach, the author has done an excellent job in enabling researchers and students alike to reproduce the analyses and learn by doing. Another quality as a textbook is the fact that every chapter ends with Workbook sections where the user is invited to exercise his or her analysis skills on supplemental datasets. Full solutions including code, results and comments are given in Appendix A (30 pages). Instructors are therefore very well served by this text, although they might want to balance the book with some more mathematical treatment depending on the target audience. After the introductory chapter on R, the book opens on graphical data exploration. Chapter 3 treats probability distributions and common sampling distributions. Under basic statistical methods (Chapter 4), distribution tests and tests on means and variances are covered. Chapter 5 deals with clustering and classification. Strangely enough, the clustering section has material on PCA, factor analysis, correspondence analysis and includes only one subsection on clustering, devoted notably to hierarchical partitioning methods. The classification part deals with decision trees, discriminant analysis and support vector machines. The regression chapter (Chapter 6) treats linear models, generalised linear models, piecewise linear models and a substantial section on models for lexical richness. The final chapter on mixed models is particularly interesting as it is one of the few text book accounts that introduce the reader to using the (innovative) lme4 package of Douglas Bates which implements linear mixed-effects models. Moreover, the case studies included in this

Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R

Thank you for downloading constructions a construction grammar approach to argument structure. As you may know, people have search numerous times for their favorite readings like this constructions a construction grammar approach to argument structure, but end up in harmful downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they cope with some harmful virus inside their computer.

Constructions A Construction Grammar Approach To Argument Structure

This volume collects three decades of articles by distinguish linguist Joan Bybee. Her articles essentially argue for the importance of frequency of use as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. Her work has been very influential for a broad range of researchers in linguistics, particularly in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, phonology, phonetics, and historical linguistics.

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Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007, VIII + 365 p. (Witold Mańczak)

This textbook examines empirical linguistics from a theoretical linguist’s perspective. It provides both a theoretical discussion of what quantitative corpus linguistics entails and detailed, hands-on, step-by-step instructions to implement the techniques in the field. The statistical methodology and R-based coding from this book teach readers the basic and then more advanced skills to work with large data sets in their linguistics research and studies. Massive data sets are now more than ever the basis for work that ranges from usage-based linguistics to the far reaches of applied linguistics. This book presents much of the methodology in a corpus-based approach. However, the corpus-based methods in this book are also essential components of recent developments in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Material from the book will also be appealing to researchers in digital humanities and the many non-linguistic fields that use textual data analysis and text-based sensorimetrics. Chapters cover topics including corpus processing, frequencing data, and clustering methods. Case studies illustrate each chapter with accompanying data sets, R code, and exercises for use by readers. This book may be used in advanced undergraduate courses, graduate courses, and self-study.

Corpus Linguistics and Statistics with R

In this paper, I develop a composite methodology for handling and visualizing measures of significant attraction between lexical items in a set of near-synonyms. I aim to uncover revealing aspects of the conceptual structure of four English moderators (rather, quite, fairly, and pretty) and shed new light on previous studies on degree modifiers. This methodology combines univariate and multivariate statistics. Collexemes are used as input for hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis, and multiple distinctive collexemes are used as input for correspondence analysis.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00731035/document

Visualizing distances in a set of near synonyms: rather, quite, fairly, and pretty.

Corpus linguists dig into large-scale collections of texts to better understand the rules governing a given language. We advocate for ambitious corpus linguistics drawing inspiration from the latest developments of semiparametrics for a modern targeted learning. Transgressing discipline-specific borders, we adapt an approach that has proven successful in biostatistics and apply it to the well-travelled case study of the dative alternation in English. A dative alternation is characterized by sentence pairs with the same verb, but different syntactic patterns, e.g. I gave a book to him (prepositional dative) and I gave him a book (double-object dative). Our aim is to explain how native speakers of English choose a pattern over another in any given context. The essence of the approach hinges on causal analysis and targeted minimum loss estimation (TMLE). Through causal analysis, we operationalize the set of scientific questions that we wish to address regarding the dative alternation. Drawing on the philosophy of TMLE, we answer these questions by targeting some versatile machine learners. We derive estimates and confidence regions for well-defined parameters that can be interpreted as the influence of each contextual variable on the outcome of the alternation (prepositional vs. double-object), all other things being equal.

/pdf/predicting-is-not-explaining-targeted-learning-of-the-dative-2dthu5i0dc.pdf

Predicting is not explaining: targeted learning of the dative alternation

Non-redundant taxonomic models of construction grammar posit that only fully productive patterns qualify as constructions because they license an infinity of expressions. Redundant models claim that, despite subregularities and exceptions, partially productive patterns also count as constructions , providing the overall meanings of such patterns are not the strict sums of their parts. Because productivity is a major bone of contention between redundant and non-redundant construction grammar taxonomies, I examine the productivity of A as NP which, according to Kay (2013), is not a 'construction' but merely a 'pattern of coining' due to its limited type productivity. Expanding on Gries (2013), this paper explores how a combination of symmetric and asymmet-ric association measures can contribute to the study of the 'Productivity Complex' described in Zeldes (2012). Although the productivity of A as NP is admittedly limited at its most schematic level, some partially-filled subschemas such as white/black as NP or A as hell/death are arguably productive.

/pdf/a-lesson-from-associative-learning-2t6zgu11yl.pdf

A lesson from associative learning

Cette these aborde les mecanismes de la variation et du changement linguistiques sous l’angle cognitif des Grammaires de Constructions Dans une perspective centree sur l’usage, une construction est a la fois stable et potentiellement innovante D’un cote, l’assemblage symbolique de forme et de sens qui la constitue est relativement fige, dans la mesure ou il est le produit conventionnel d’une abstraction collective realisee a partir de l’experience linguistique De l’autre, les locuteurs ne reproduisent pas exactement les memes assemblages, ce qui fait que des reanalyses sont possibles Ce differentiel cree, pour chaque construction, une zone de developpement potentiel, grace a laquelle la grammaire s’adapte a la flexibilite linguistique
L’hypothese de travail developpee ici est que l’analyse des constructions intermediaires fournit un point d’acces privilegie dans la comprehension de la creativite et de l’innovation, d’un point de vue linguistique et cognitif C’est la raison pour laquelle nous plaidons en faveur d’une Grammaire de Constructions Floue Nos etudes de cas tendent a montrer que le reagencement forme/sens prend la forme de blends grammaticaux, dont nous proposons une redefinition, suite a un examen critique des travaux de Fauconnier et Turner (1996) Ces schemas d’integration constructionnelle forment la cle de voute de notre modele explicatif Ils s’appuient sur le fait qu’une construction cognitivement saillante joue le role de jalon dans la grammaire mentale des locuteurs, ce qui la predispose (i) a exporter tout ou partie de sa trame dans l’elaboration de nouvelles unites symboliques, (ii) a faciliter l’acces a des assemblages plus complexes

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01393210/document

Guillaume Desagulier

Papers

Corpus Linguistics and Statistics with R

Visualizing distances in a set of near synonyms: rather, quite, fairly, and pretty.

Predicting is not explaining: targeted learning of the dative alternation

A lesson from associative learning

Modélisation cognitive de la variation et du changement linguistiques